Can anyone tell me what the suffix “‑fu” stands for in the following sentence?
If you want to take advantage of some other Spring-fu, like some of its aspect-oriented features, then you’ll need to use this heavy-handed, direct object management technique.
It stands for "(advanced) skill". There are lots of similar constructions, such as "Script-Fu", "Google-Fu", and so on. Wiktionary has an article on the suffix -fu:
Etymology
From kung-fuSuffix
1. (slang) Expertise; mastery.
- My google-fu is weak!
- Aragorn uses Ranger-fu to figure out that Sam and Frodo have taken a boat.
Like many idioms with little historical depth, the use of -fu has more to do with cultural themes than grammatical construction and meaning. The pseudo-word "Spring-fu" is a construction meant to allegorically refer to kung-fu that endows the scripting language Spring with the mysticism and complexity of a martial art --- something that requires dedication to master and has hidden benefits ("really cool ju-ju") if mastered. Consequently, the current definitions of the suffix -fu are inadequate to describe the cultural use of the suffix in this evolving context.
Around the 1990s, in the US, there was a movie reviewer who wrote under the name "Joe Bob Briggs". He specialized in reviewing low-budget, trashy action movies, with a lot of fight scenes.
The reviews typically end with a brief rating of the movie in question's "high points", including the types of action (represented by nouns naming objects used in fight scenes suffixed with "-Fu") [Wikipedia]
As an example
No dead bodies. One hundred seventeen breasts. Multiple aardvarking.[a] Lap dancing. Cage dancing. Convenience-store dancing. Blindfold aardvarking. Blind-MAN aardvarking. Lesbo [sic] Fu. Pool cue-Fu [emphasis added]. Drive-In Academy Award nominations for Tané McClure. Joe Bob says check it out. [Wikipedia]
This usage spread to the programming culture of the 1990s, and "scripting-fu" is the earliest usage I can remember. Apparently, it seems to have persisted.
From Chinese books written in English on the history of exercises (as well as martial arts), I understand the meaning of kungfu or gongfu to be much more ancient than any of the arts: it's a word for,
an activity of great skill.
In other words, it could be applied to say, a fisherman, smith, or cook, 2 centuries BC.
The way it's applied, the idea is sort of right, but also strange language: Kungfu doesn't mean you're skilled at 'Kung', while 'Fu' isn't a separate word with the meaning preserved.
I think it's an accident, inspired by the display of skill in popular martial arts movies, and applied to everything, but using a strange concatenation.
It would be more correct to write, and it would preserve the meaning to write,
'Script kungfu'
or
'Google kungfu.'
It's also a skill you exercise, rather than an achievement you can point to after the fact. This is different from Western thought, and also means that at any time, anyone can practice a skill, in order to exercise it; and that exercising it has a point, and could be the point.
Fu in Chinese means blessing or good fortune. Here it would be something like a great feature of the Java library Spring.
